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European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

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Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#161

Post by [deleted] »

ecshafer wrote: post #117
troyvit wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the part I hope Europe gets. They don't have nearly as much money to throw at Matrix as Microsoft can throw at Teams, but they do have massive resources, and I bet that since Matrix doesn't have many of the same shitty KPIs as Slack and Teams, those resources can go much further.

The lack of shitty KPIs is the main thing. Hiring 10 full time devs to work on Matrix would probably be more effective than 500 full time devs on Slack/Teams with most of them stuck on weird Product Manager goals and renaming things to Copilot 365 Teams with Copilot.

[deleted]

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#162

Post by forsakenharmony »

Arathorn wrote: post #130
thibaut_barrere wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France is leveraging Matrix in Tchap https://element.io/fr/case-studies/tchap (part of La Suite Numérique https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/#products recently featured on HN). Presumably there is funding or resources because of that.

France donates to the Matrix Foundation (which helps the protocol retain its neutrality and independence, and is very much appreciated), but doesn't currently financially support Element's dev as their upstream. We're trying to fix that though!

better this way than the other way, element doesn't support the matrix foundation enough

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#163

Post by tabbott »

cue_the_strings wrote: post #136

As I've said before, Matrix really is the only viable open source solution for in-company communication. Every other solution (Zulip / Mattermost / whatever) is too risky, they could easily bait-and-switch you like Gitlab did, by moving important features to different tiers, or engage in other shenanigans afforded by the open core model. Matrix has a bad reputation because it used to be downright terrible (first time…

Correction: Zulip is 100% open-source software, and has been for a decade now. (I lead the Zulip project). Zulip's protocol, which is used for client/server communication by all major clients, has extensive documentation including the complete change history for the last several years on https://zulip.com/api/ and https://zulip.com/api/changelog.

As far as I know, there is no mechanism through which Zulip could bait-and-switch a customer that Element could not also do. And I think that as a practical matter, it would be a lot easier for a new team to pick up developing Zulip if the Kandra Labs team were to disappear than the similar question for Matrix/Element.

The core reason is that Matrix is far less simple and self-contained than Zulip. I've talked to multiple groups who tried to build apps on top of Matrix and found it too difficult. https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/giving-up-on-element-and-matrixorg... may be a useful third-party reference.

This isn't to say Matrix is bad. It's just targeting a different niche. Matrix was designed around the requirements of a global social network, where you want to be able to keep writing in channels even in event of a network partition. As a result, Matrix is far more complex and less self-contained than a Zulip server is. If you are doing internal communications with some external guests, you are far safer from technical risk with a robust self-contained system like Zulip than something like Matrix that is also a social network.

Zulip's goal is to be the best way to do complex work, focused on replacing tools like Slack, Teams, and Discord, without the ambition to support a social network, and that changes a lot about the architecture and what we can do in terms of performance and focus on the human experience.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#164

Post by NedF »

yabones wrote: post #39

My team started using Matrix/Element after years of frustration with Teams and Slack. It's far from perfect, but using a simple application with no built-in ads, AI, bloat, crap, etc is wonderful. I really hope the EU throws some serious money at them to get the bugs worked out, add some minor features, and clean up the UX enough that an "office normie" can onboard as easily as MS. My dream is that Matrix can do for…

[dead]

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#165

Post by viccis »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #113
pembrook wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, if you have to waste an extra 15 minutes per day due to bad UX who cares, it’s much better that you get the self-satisfied feeling of sticking it to “the man” (American big tech). I mean it only adds up to 90 days of your life wasted over a 30 year career. European peoples time has a lower salary value anyways. UX doesn’t even matter that much, the political meme of the day is much more important.

Microsoft Teams already is already terrible UX, we have nowhere to go but up. Perhaps you are unaware, and if so, you should be thankful you don’t have to lose time using it. There are objectively better solutions available.

Matrix is so much worse than Team it will make your head spin. It suffers from design by committee to an unbelievable extent, and its various end-to-end security features are wonderful from a privacy standpoint but make things much much more complicated.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#166

Post by tabbott »

Arathorn wrote: post #19
mhitza wrote: post #14

Can someone that uses Matrix compare it to Zulip? Which would have been my "obvious" choice. Is it functionally comparable, discussion threads and all? Or is it much closer to something like Discord?

Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted. Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.

I'm sure you could do some of Zulip's features on top of Matrix.

But for what it's worth, as Zulip's lead developer, every time I'm looked at whether we could have built Zulip on top of Matrix, it just feels impossible to me. And a big part of it is the architectural decisions Matrix made to support a decentralized E2EE social network, which are not required for a self-contained chat system like Zulip or Slack (which can still be bridged with other chat systems). Permissions enforcement, performance, and lots of other details really benefit from the more focused goal, where we've explicitly decided we're not building a generic distributed network architecture and are not competing with WhatsApp.

That said, I think it's great that we have multiple OSS chat systems with different strategies that are targeting different collections of niches!

I will never understand why so many organizations entrusted the communications fabric of their organization to Microsoft and SalesForce Cloud services over the last decade. If an organization can succeed in escaping Teams or Slack to Element/Matrix, that's great, even if it's a use case where Zulip would be a better end-user experience for their requirements.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#167

Post by ezst »

cue_the_strings wrote: post #140
dreamteam1 wrote: post #71

* open source * don’t suck (too much) * no planned rug pulls * not infested by US or Chinese spyware Are there any?

Only Matrix.

And XMPP. Which probably will remain a better Matrix than Matrix ever will be, the venture capital put aside, that is.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#168

Post by ipdashc »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #47

This does not bode well. Matrix is honestly not good, as someone who has tried to use it. It's slow, janky, often unstable, and poorly standardized. My suggestion: https://threema.com/en/products/work (hosted) or https://zulip.com/ (OSS self-hosted).

Zulip is phenomenal. Cool and unique concept, clean and snappy UI. I have no idea why it's not more popular. (Network effects and an unfamiliar layout, I suppose.)

I see the comments that say Matrix has improved a lot, so maybe it's fine now, but yeah, when I tried it previously it sucked. Weird UI was my chief complaint, but more importantly it didn't seem like there was a proper concept of organizations, in the sense of Discord or Slack servers? With roles, channels, even silly things like custom emojis. Matrix at the time seemed like just an SMS group chat replacement, I have no idea why people recommended it for organizational use. Maybe it's improved since.

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#169

Post by iknowstuff »

pm3003 wrote: post #58
iknowstuff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France’s government uses Matrix. Presumably a nice perk to be able to talk to them via federation

Germany (government and armed forces) and NATO also use it.

Germany?? I can’t imagine unless they’re using it to send pictures of signed and stamped printed and scanned letters

Re: European Commission Trials Matrix to Replace Teams

#170

Post by xethos »

edoceo wrote: post #62
blitzar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Element is buggy Someone should tell the CEO/CTO of Element

Arathorn is the CEO. I bet you knew that. At the time I write this your comment is grey. Maybe context was missing; or they think you're snark.

I assumed it was because people here are constantly telling Arathorn that Element (not ElementX) is slow and buggy, and that when they last tried the default server (circa 2019 or so) is was buggy and full of rough edges

He's (in my mind) always positive, open, and willing to admit the shortcomings of the platform he shephards... but damn does he deal with a lot of undeserved criticism (and deserved criticism, where applicable)

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